


It's a Crazy Beautiful Disaster

by megster



Series: In These Small Hours [7]
Category: Marvel Avengers Movies Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-21
Updated: 2012-07-21
Packaged: 2017-11-10 10:40:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,737
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/465356
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/megster/pseuds/megster
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Darcy Lewis has never killed anyone before. Until today.</p>
            </blockquote>





	It's a Crazy Beautiful Disaster

The day that Darcy Lewis learns that she’s capable of killing is bright and warm and Phil Coulson is drugged to the gills.

It happens when they least expect it, because that’s just how Darcy’s life _is_ these days.

But the gist of it is this: Darcy and Phil are on a very basic milk run for Fury. They’re in a nice hotel room in a small, nondescript town, and Darcy goes to pick up some food for them while Phil meets with some “clients.”

*          *          *

Darcy knows she’s in trouble when she’s walking back from the parking lot, pizza in her hands, and she hears footsteps behind her.

Whoever’s following her is _trying_ to be quiet, but Darcy lives with Clint and Natasha. Compared to them, this idiot is clomping around like an elephant. 

So she turns quickly, taser already in hand, and shoots him with Tony’s newest prototype. The guy drops like a stone, and Darcy leaves him where he falls. If she’s being followed, it’s likely that Phil is being watched too.

Leaving the pizza at the lobby desk (“Could you hold on to this for me? Just for a few minutes?”), Darcy goes for the stairs. 

They’re only on the second floor, so the staircase is probably faster anyway. And if anybody’s compromised the elevator, Darcy does not want to be on it.

She bursts onto their floor, heart pounding, because yeah, she’s seen aliens and mutant platypuses and Doombots, but she always had the Avengers right there, and this time it’s just her and Phil a hundred miles away from the team and Phil is perfectly capable of taking care of himself but she’s still _worried_ and as she nears the room she hears screaming and her heart leaps into her throat.

She considers panicking, but Natasha’s taught her better than that. 

Two things most people don’t know about Darcy:

  1. __She’s an _excellent_ shot. Not as good as Natasha or Clint, of course. But definitely above average. Just because she prefers her taser doesn’t mean she doesn’t know how to shoot a gun. And she spends time on the firing range, just to keep in practice.
  2. __Phil Coulson is one of Darcy’s favorite people in the world. Not that she’d ever admit it to Jane, but Phil is the best boss she’s ever had. He’s terrifyingly competent and in control, but always listens to what she has to say. And he’s surprisingly funny and he looks out for her, bringing her coffee when she’s had a long night and teaching her how to kill two people with one medium-sized paper clip. So, yeah. Darcy _adores_ Phil.



 

And if anyone has hurt him, Darcy is relatively sure she’d be willing to tear off their heads with her bare hands. Although if anything’s happened to Phil, she’d probably have to get in line and wait her turn as the Avengers ripped these guys to pieces. And, huh, it occurs to her that maybe she’s hanging out with what her mother would consider “the bad crowd.”

She turns the corner, and, well, fuck, there’s a guy standing guard outside of the room. He’s standing with his arms crossed, and she sees holsters on both hips and his left shoulder.

It doesn’t matter, because he doesn’t look at her as she walks down the hall, doesn’t realize until too late that Darcy is holding a slim metallic object in her right hand, doesn’t perceive her as a threat until she tases him halfway into tomorrow.

She catches him as he falls unconscious and lowers him to the ground silently. Natasha will have her head if she loses the element of surprise here.

She tries to reload the taser, but finds that it’s jammed. Tony’s going to hear about this when it’s all over.

She digs in her purse for her handgun and prepares to go in.

The door is left cracked open, and _that_ seals it, these guys are either not professionals, or entirely too sure of their own abilities. Darcy finds it in herself to smirk a little at their convenient carelessness.

There is a small, reasonable part of her that acknowledges that she is way out of her depth here. The rest of her, though, shoves that feeling aside, because on some occasions Darcy Lewis has no _time_ to be reasonable.

This is one of those occasions.

So she slips into the room and takes in the situation as well as she can. There’s only one guy in the room, and Phil tied to a chair and screaming, and Darcy’s puzzled until she sees the empty syringe on the ground.

Okay, she thinks. I can do this. Because the guy standing in front of Phil has his back to her and hasn’t noticed her yet, and Darcy’s a good shot, an excellent shot. But the fact remains that while she’s tased many, many people, she’s never actually killed anyone.

Then the guy throws a vicious right hook at Phil’s stomach, and _is he wearing brass knuckles_ and Phil sort of lets out a choked cry and then Darcy goes kind of cold inside and she slowly, calmly raises her gun, flicks off the safety, and empties a round into the guy’s back.

As soon as his body hits the ground, Darcy wants to throw up, but she ruthlessly buries the urge because she doesn’t have the luxury of falling apart yet.

The first thing she does is drag the guy she got with her taser into the room and lock the door. She finds Phil’s set of cuffs in his bag and closes them around the unconscious man.

She avoids looking at the bloody body on the floor. There will be plenty of time to face that later.

She calls the Avengers emergency line as she crouches by Phil, trying to get him to respond to her.

When Bruce answers, sounding concerned, Darcy nearly falls apart then and there.

“Darcy? What’s happened? Do you need us?”

“Yeah,” she says shakily. “The guys we were supposed to get the intel from, they drugged Phil. I don’t know what to do. He’s not in good shape. And there’s two unconscious guys that I got with my taser and one of them’s dead. I killed him.” She takes a shuddering breath.

“Okay,” Bruce says evenly. “We’ll be with you in about half an hour, okay?” There’s a pause, and some muffled voices. Then he says, “Darce, Tony’s going to be there very, very soon. Just stay where you are, make sure nobody comes in. And keep your phone on you. Tony’ll call when he gets close.”

“All right,” Darcy says. “What do I do with Phil?”

“What’s wrong with him?” Bruce says. “How’s he breathing? Pupils? Is he lucid?”

“Um,” Darcy says. She checks his pulse and his breathing rate. “Pulse is erratic. So’s the breathing. Pupils are extremely dilated. And he’s definitely not lucid right now. Shhhhh, it’s fine. Everything’s fine.”

The last is to Phil, who seems to have seen her at last and is mumbling something frantically. There’s raw terror in his eyes, and something in her gut twists at seeing him so hysterical. Because Phil is always in perfect control over himself, with not even the slightest twitch of the lips giving away anything that he didn’t want to give away.

“Just try to keep him calm, Darcy,” Bruce says. “I don’t know what else we can do without hurting him. We’re on our way. Hang in there.”

“Okay,” Darcy says, because really, what else can she say?

“Do you want me to stay on the phone until Tony gets there?” Bruce offers.

“No,” Darcy says, because no matter how much she wants to say yes, she has to give Phil her full attention because he deserves nothing less. “I’ll see you soon,” she says, and hangs up.

She cuts the ropes tying Phil to the chair, but immediately regrets it as he begins to thrash around. 

By the time her phone rings twelve minutes later, Darcy doesn’t even pretend to be interested in how Tony arrived so fast. All that matters is that he did.

He crashes through the window, and Darcy has never been so glad to see him.

“Tony, _help_ ,” she says a little desperately, and Tony steps forward.

Phil startles at the sight of Tony and presses himself to the wall.

Tony flips up his faceplate, takes in the scene. Darcy, crouching by a frantic Phil, a bloody body by the bed, an unconscious thug cuffed to the door.

He appears to make a decision, and the suit begins to slide off his body. It disassembles itself until Tony is surrounded by an organized heap of red and gold. He obviously is hoping that being out of the suit will make him less intimidating.

Tony comes to Darcy and Phil, slowly, with even, measured movements. “Hey, Agent,” Tony says. “I hear you’re a little worse for the wear.”

And Darcy, because she knows Tony, hears the current of anger running through his light words, hears how much he wants to kill the men who did this to Phil.

Except she’s already taken care of that, hasn’t she?

Darcy has to once again push back the urge to vomit because she is Darcy Lewis and she _will_ see this through and she will not allow herself to cry or throw up or anything until everything is taken care of.

Phil is still _completely_ out of it, but there’s really nothing either of them can do but wait for the others. So Darcy sits, arms clasped around her knees, and dully listens as Tony rambles on about pointless things. His babbling is comforting, in a way, and Darcy finds herself relaxing a little. Phil quiets, too, and Darcy tries to work up the energy to take a jab at Tony, to tell him that his voice is putting everyone to sleep, but can’t quite bring herself to.

It’s almost gotten peaceful, with Tony talking softly and gently, cross-legged on the floor, and Phil with his eyes fluttering open and shut when the others arrive.

Thor comes hurtling through the window that Tony came through, swinging Clint inside before entering himself. Natasha and Steve and Bruce come crashing through the door and Darcy wants to cry from relief.

“About time you lot got here,” Tony says, and they all hear the tension in his voice.

Clint’s eyes brush over Darcy, and he squeezes her arm gently before kneeling by Phil, murmuring softly to his handler.

Natasha comes to her, says, “You did well.”

Darcy shakes her head, because they’re all here, and everything is going to be okay, and she’s just killed a man, and then she makes the mistake of looking into Bruce’s soft, sad eyes and she comes undone.

All at once it hits her that this is her life now, and sometimes it’s awesome, but sometimes it really sucks and she has to see her friends get hurt and she’s just killed a man, and she isn’t sorry, but at the same time she is, and then she can’t take it and she gets up and rushes to the restroom and is violently sick.

She’s not sure how long she sits there, with her head swimming and a sour taste in her mouth, but eventually there’s a hesitant knock on the door, and Bruce pokes his head into the bathroom.

“Darcy,” he says gently. That’s it. No false platitudes or comfort. Just her name. It brings her to tears.

“I killed him,” she says. “And I’m _glad_ I did, because _fuck_ him, nobody fucks with my friends on my watch. I’m not sorry that I killed him, but I think maybe I wish I didn’t. And you know, my life used to be normal and I used to actually think I’d get a normal job that didn’t involve, you know, guns and aliens.”

Bruce comes to her and gathers her into a hug, and that’s big for him because he’s still wary of touching people, and Darcy fleetingly realizes this, appreciates it, then buries her face in his shoulder.

“Is Phil going to be okay?” She asks, voice muffled because her face is still pressed to Bruce.

“He’ll be up and running by tomorrow afternoon,” Bruce assures her. “The drugs should work their way out of his system naturally, and I sedated him so he’ll rest.”

“Okay,” Darcy whispers. “That’s good then. Everything’s fine.”

*          *          *

It’s one thing to _hear_ that Phil was going to be okay, and entirely another to see him walking about briskly in an impeccably pressed suit.

Darcy’s in his office, sitting curled on the couch, taking care of some paperwork for Phil when he walks through the door.

She sets aside her dignity and throws herself at him before he’s even fully in the office, completely ignoring the bemused interns walking down the hall. (There will be rumors, later, that Darcy is a little cracked in the head, because nobody ever sets a hand on Agent Coulson unexpectedly unless they want to end up with a broken wrist.)

“I missed you,” Darcy says fervently.

“It’s been less than a day since you’ve seen me,” Phil says mildly, but he returns her hug warmly.

“Yeah, but I still _missed_ you,” Darcy says.

They fall easily back into their routine of quietly filing paperwork, Darcy occasionally offering a snide comment and Phil calmly shooting her down, well practiced from dealing with Clint.

It’s about an hour before Phil really says anything, though. When he does, Darcy is a little bit sad and a lot surprised at what he says. “Do you want out, Darcy?”

“What do you mean?” Darcy says, even though she knows perfectly well what he means.

Phil looks at her evenly. “If you’d like, I can get you released from your contract. I’ll find you a new job, and you’ll never have to deal with S.H.I.E.L.D. again.”

“Jesus, Phil,” she says, even though she usually calls him Agent Coulson during work hours. “I wouldn’t trade what I have for anything. I promise.”

Phil nods. “Okay.”

And that’s just it, isn’t it? Her life is a fucking comedy of errors, and sometimes people end up hurt or dead, and all she wants is for _her_ people to stay safe. And if she has to occasionally shoot a guy or two to make that happen? Well, so be it.

Because she is _Darcy Lewis_ and she is realistic about her chances of living to an old age if she sticks with this particular career choice, but she’s okay with it. Because even though there’s really, really bad times, there’s also the really good ones where she gets to hear Phil’s voice in her ear telling her to please handle PETA because the mutant platypuses aren’t getting killed and where she spars with Natasha and only ends up with a few bruises. The times where she and Clint sneak out to catch a movie with Steve, or where she spends hours in Tony’s lab listening to him talk and watching him build. And where she goes out drinking with Jane and has to let Thor carry them both home. And the times where she slips into Bruce’s kitchen and lets him cook her an omelette while she prepares coffee for the both of them.

So, yeah. A year ago she’d never have dreamed that she would kill a man in cold blood. But a year ago she was different, a year ago she didn’t count the goddamn Avengers among her best friends. A year ago, she wasn’t the person she is now.

And she wouldn’t trade it for the world.

She grins widely at Phil. “I went out and got cake pops from your favorite bakery,” she says.

Phil will try to deny it, she knows it, but his eyes light up. “Red velvet?” 

“Of course,” Darcy says, and pulls out the box from beside the couch. 

“You’re my favorite,” Phil says, taking one.

A muffled, “ _Hey_ ,” is heard from above, and Darcy rolls her eyes.

“I bought some birthday cake pops too, Clint,” she says, and has to smile when Clint drops from the ceiling, landing lightly on his feet.

Her life is crazy and terrible and wonderful all at once, but it’s what she has. 

She’s pretty sure she loves it.

**Author's Note:**

> I know this is a little more serious than the other works in this series... And I'm not sure how it got that way. Hopefully just bear with me through this one and the next one will be a bit more lighthearted! Hope you enjoyed anyway.


End file.
